Himalayan Journals — Complete: Or, Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains, etc.Hooker, Joseph Dalton
History
Himalayan Journals — Complete: Or, Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains, etc.
Hooker, Joseph Dalton
Himalaya Mountains -- Description and travel; Natural history -- Himalaya Mountains
Mr. Hopkins has mathematically demonstrated that the continued exertion
of a force in raising superimposed strata would tend to produce two
classes of fractures in those strata; those of the first order at right
angles to the direction of the wave or ridge (or line of strike); those
of the second order parallel to the strike. Supposing the force to be
withdrawn after the formation of the two fractures, the result would be
a ridge, or mountain chain, with diverging fissures from the summit,
crossed by concentric fissures; and the courses which the rivers would
take in flowing down the ridge, would successively be at right angles
and parallel to the strike of the strata. Now, in the Himalaya, a
prevalent strike to the north-west has been recognised in all parts of
the chain, but it is everywhere interfered with by mountains presenting
every other direction of strike, and by their dip never remaining
constant either in amount or direction. Consequently, as might be
expected, the directions of the river channels bear no apparent
relation to the general strike of the rocks.
We crossed the Ratong (twenty yards broad) by a cane bridge, suspended
between two rocks of green chlorite, full of veins of granite.
Ascending, we passed the village of Kameti on a spur, on the face of
which were strewed some enormous detached blocks of white and pink
stratified quartz: the rocks _in situ_ were all chlorite schist.
Looking across the valley to the flank of Mainom, the disposition of
the ridges and ravines on its sides was very evident; many of the
latter, throughout their westerly course, from their commencement at
10,000 feet, to their debouchure in the Great Rungeet at 2000, had a
bluff, cliffy, northern flank, and a sloping southern one. The dip of
the surfaces is, therefore, north-west, the exposure consequently of
the villages which occupy terraces on the south flanks of the lateral
valleys. The Tassiding spur presented exactly the same arrangement of
its ravines, and the dip of the rocks being north-west, it follows that
the planes of the sloping surfaces coincide in direction (though not in
amount of inclination) with that of the dip of the subjacent strata,
which is anything but a usual phenomenon in Sikkim.
The ascent to Pemiongchi continued very steep, through woods of oaks,
chesnuts, and magnolias, but no tree-fern, palms, _Pothos,_ or
plantain, which abound at this elevation on the moister outer ranges of
Sikkim. The temple (elev. 7,083 feet) is large, eighty feet long, and
in excellent order, built upon the lofty terminal point of the great
east and west spur that divides the Kulhait from the Ratong and Rungbee
rivers; and the great Changachelling temple and monastery stand on
another eminence of the same ridge, two miles further west.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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